77 trains, 77 days and the journey of a lifetime

A couple of weeks ago, I had breakfast in New York with a Malaysian accountant-turned-banker named Azman Mokhtar, who I first met years ago when he ran the Khazanah sovereign wealth fund. He arrived carrying a fat photo book entitled Kembara Kretapi: Around the World in Trains of Thoughts. It was the memento of an epic journey he took in 2019, boarding exactly 77 trains over 77 consecutive days as he circumnavigated the globe.

The idea, he explained, was to celebrate something known as kembara in Malay (probably best translated as “wanderlust”). Planes are not well suited for kembara, since being 30,000 feet above the ground detaches you from, well, the Earth. Train travel, by contrast, enables you to better experience the places you’re travelling through.

Mokhtar had dreamt of this pilgrimage for 40 years while working in finance, so when he finally retired in 2019, he took off. “The world is both small and large, and life is both long and short,” he writes in the book. “Live it.”

It is a sentiment that most of us might usefully ponder right now. For one thing, it shows the power of escape fantasies as a way to sustain our imaginations during long careers. For another, kembara seems like a doubly precious commodity today. Back in 2019, when Mokhtar boarded his first train (from Kajang to Muzium Negara in Malaysia), he assumed that the world would always be open for anyone who wanted to explore it.

So did most people whose careers had been built on the back of globalisation. If you had a travel dream, there seemed no reason to rush.

But soon after Mokhtar finished his 77th train ride, Covid-19 erupted. And while the pandemic has now ebbed, it would be hard to replicate his trip at present given China’s quarantine regime and rising tensions between Russia and the west.

Indeed, in a world of growing geopolitical strife and uncertainty, it seems increasingly naive to assume that borders will remain open, even when the pandemic is over. In a deglobalising, uncertain age, travel opportunities need to be grabbed.

Mokhtar’s journey demonstrated something else, too: the power of putting your feet on the ground. During much of his later career, he worked in the Petronas Towers in Malaysia, the tallest of their kind in the world.

This was an elevated perch, both physically and metaphorically. But it also symbolised a problem: financiers and executives often work in places and ways that leave them feeling as if they have a right to float above everyone else. To counter that, Mokhtar says that he often urged his staff to engage in kembara in their jobs, by walking incognito around the companies and places that the fund invested in. His long-planned trip was a way to counter the detachment he felt after years spent in an office tower.

Financiers and executives often work in places and ways that leave them feeling as if they have a right to float above everyone else

What he encountered along the way was not necessarily shocking; the value came from numerous tiny surprises. In the rail carriages of Vietnam he was stunned by the entrepreneurial spirit of the other passengers and the fact that so many people smoked “peace pipes” on board (“Things they don’t teach you at Harvard Business School!” he joked in his Instagram posts).

On a stop in Lhasa he saw Tibetan monks teaching their students in a manner that left him concluding that “tutorial cultures in tahfiz madrasas, Oxbridge colleges and ancient Tibetan temples perhaps have more in common than commonly thought”. In Russia he stumbled on unexpected beauty in the Moscow metro system and, as a devout Muslim, was thrilled to discover that the Saint Petersburg Mosque “was the largest in Europe” when it opened in 1913.

In Sweden he had a less pleasant surprise: the trains were badly delayed, and another passenger swore at him. He viewed this as a sign of “a turbulent upside down world”, where “developed” countries no longer seemed quite so advanced.

In America he faced more delays, and despaired that “the nation that gave us the great transcontinental railroad . . . just won’t upgrade its infrastructure”. But after he got the last seat on the 2,500km journey from Perth to Adelaide in Australia, he marvelled at the beauty of the Nullarbor Plain and the “pretty garden city” he found in Adelaide (Day 73).

To hardened explorers, such observations might seem mundane. But after looking at Mokhtar’s book, I felt not just inspired but also embarrassed about how we used to take globetrotting for granted in our pre-pandemic age, when nobody worried about the type of labour shortages and flight cancellations that we are currently seeing in Europe. Today, uncertainty is the new certainty. So, if you, like Mokhtar, have secret travel dreams, the message is simple: act on them now or soon. With or without trains.

Follow Gillian on Twitter @gilliantett and email her at gillian.tett@ft.com

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